Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I feel far more productive working from home, both professionally and personally. I keep a running list of the tasks I want to accomplish. It includes my work, my hobbies, exercise, and my chores around the home. I just keep working that list, almost constantly, and get more done than I ever did while in an office. Because there is a variety of work and fun on the list, I don't get burned out. I also don't get overwhelmed because aside from updating the list, I focus on one task at a time. I do take breaks to just relax and spend time with family, of course.

Working from home can turn into a blur of you do not manage your work and your time somehow. For some people, that just try to replicate the office and work 9-5 with some activity to replace the commute to give themselves a psychological distance from their "home" time. But I've found that the most productive remote workers are the ones who work a few hours at a time, a few times a day, and live their own life outside of those working times.

I'd recommend playing with different schedules to find on that works for you, and be deliberate about what you are doing - work when you are working, play when you are playing, relax when you are relaxing.

I need to do this, thanks for sharing.

I'm more productive at home, but when I'm online during "working hours" I feel guilty doing house work or side projects during that time, so when I have free time I end up doing the same time wasting stuff I used to do in the office, surfing, news, reddit etc.

I appreciate the feedback and will try to get better at listing my tasks. One thing that I will struggle to copy is figuring out the best schedule that works for me.

Our team finds it hard when there is too much flexibility in the schedule when working remotely. If you are more of an individual contributor, flexible schedule works, but the setup of our team is not like that due to the nature of our projects.

To solve this, our company set working hours that we would follow. However, not all comply with this since some of my co-workers are still going out for long errands.

There is also a lag due to technical issues and the overall setup of remote work where you don't know what's going on with your co-workers. Questions that would typically take a minute to answer if you are working onsite take minutes or sometimes hours to be resolved.

It might be useful to make a distinction between async work and remote work. We are remote but not async; if you are going offline for several hours between 9 and 5 you need to warn the team in advance and probably take some PTO because you are going to be missing from your Zoom calls, not responding on Slack, etc.

I am not the person you are responding to, but the two are not mutually exclusive. You can still answer your messages and not miss meetings. For example:

- 8h30AM start working, until 10AM, mostly focused work.

- Take 5 minutes to start the laundry.

- 10h05AM to 11AM, back to work. Mostly focused work.

- Meeting from 11AM to 12PM.

- Lunch from 12PM to 12h30PM.

- Work/meeting from 12h30PM to 2PM.

- Random chores around the house from 2PM to 2h30PM.

- Work/meeting 2h30PM to 4PM.

- Go for a 30 minutes run. I have my phone with me, obviously won't go if I have a meeting.

- 4h45PM I am back in my chair and I work until 6PM.

Now to my colleagues, I was there the whole day. To my employer, I worked the correct number of hours. Yet personally, I was able to break my focus/meeting time into chunks and get a lot more done than if I was in office from 9 to 5.

It's not really about being async. It's about accepting that my brain will start slowing after 1-1h30 of focused work, so I can take a real break, while still doing something valuable. Whereas at work I'd probably just browse HN for 15-30 minutes.

You are correct - and I'd expand my statement to say that the most effective remote teams I've worked on are teams that supported flexibility.

All my remote teams have established expectations of what response times should be expected. I have never worked on a remote team that expected quick responses on Slack, although I know such teams do exist. My teams have varied from 1 hour to 4 for Slack response expectations. Meeting attendance is clearly expected, but my teams have always tried to respect people's boundaries and schedule them at times that work for people. It does take effort to make remote flexibility work at a team level, but the benefits in job satisfaction and getting the work done are totally worth that effort.

I have had mixed results with lists. When there’s an obvious priority for each task, i.e. I can just complete the tasks in order, I am a machine. When I need to prioritize and order the tasks, I end up paralyzed and crash hard.

Do you have any advice in this regard?

I deal with this same problem every day. But I reach out to different business people and construct a priority for my team. I would say your manager should be setting priorities for you.

Prioritization will depend on your goals, so it is hard to give specific advice. But I will say that defining your goals is the first step. Once you have those, you can figure out which tasks take you towards those goals most effectively, which tasks are blocking others, and prioritize accordingly.

FWIW, I split my tasks into three lists - Personal Tasks, Home/Property Maintenance (I live on a 40 acre hobby farm, so this adds up), and Work Tasks. Personal Tasks are driven by my goals to stay healthy and create artwork. Home/Property tasks are driven by my goals to increase food production at my home and improve our self-sustainability, and Work tasks follow my employer's goals.

Your goals likely won't match mine, but a similar breakdown might help.

Prioritization is the hardest thing for me. If you follow GTD, working on Horizons 2-5, especially 4&5, make a big difference by recognizing what your purpose and visions are for your life.

With that, prioritization has become much less challenging for me.

My question is what happens if you ever get to the end of the list? And on the other hand, what if you never can? Work from home and the pandemic in general seems to have had an effect on many peoples' sense of purpose; mine included.

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